In this project, we will analysis the global floods records from 1985 to 2008. Specifically, we will invesitgate the floods patterns over time, floods distribution across continent, causes of floods and relation between floods and air pressure.
First, to have a basic idea about world floods records, we show historical floods in a world map.
Generally speaking, there is no apparent geographical pattern about happened floods in this static map. So we built a dynamic map based on the time when floods began. We want to find out when and where floods happened frequently.
The dynamic map is available here.
From this dynamic map, it seems like that a time pattern exists, which means that the number of floods varied in different time periods. We are curious about this, and we believe that there must be a facotr or some factors influencing the number of floods. So we have the following analysis.
As a next step in the analysis, we look at the distribution of floods across the different continents throughout time. The goal is to identify possible patterns, and address questions such as:
To do this, we will divide the data into 4 roughly equally sized time periods: 1985-1993, 1994-2000, 2001-2008, 2009-2016. We will then produce plots for each continent during these periods, highlighting the flood events that occurred with their size indicating their total impact as measured on a scale that depends on displacement. A contour plot will also help us identify where clusters of these events occurred.
Interestingly on North America the majority of the events are concentrated on the east coast, while South America shows the opposite pattern. Some regions that are constantly affected by floods are the U.S. Mid-West, the Yucatan Peninsula, and the region that encompasses Colombia and Ecuador. Cuba, being an island, is also highly susceptible to these kind of natural disasters, with a large-displacement event occurring on during the 2000’s.